Webspinna Battle Artist's Statement

After a bit of a process, we decided to theme our Webspinna Battle with the age old question: which is better, a pirate or a ninja? Since this is a pop culture, modern project taking place on the internet, we wanted to have an “in-the-moment” theme. We started by gathering hallmarks of martial arts and pirate film and music, and then added in more generic sounds, (such as the ocean, traditional Japanese music, and various sound effects) to create the proper background atmosphere. It was incredibly fun to create a dialogue between our two personas using only sound clips, music, and sound effects. Especially in the middle of our performance, we tried to have a more literal exchange with different movie and TV show dialogue cut to sound like they were replying to each other. The ending of our battle was very deliberate, even if it wasn’t perfect in execution. The sounds of our battling personas were to build up loudly, and then suddenly cut off together while the single line, “Stop fighting, and let it flow,” ended our feud. This was to mirror the fact that neither a ninja nor a pirate is “better” and so there can’t be a winner.

This project perfectly echoed what Jonathan Lethem discussed in his article, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” He stated that “literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time,” and that authors, subconsciously or not, take lines, wordings, and themes from works they encounter and recut them into their own writing. He also talks about how we live in an “‘open source’ culture” where pre-existing fragments of art are available to inspire or lend themselves to new meaning in a fresh piece of art. This was, at a lower level, essentially what we tried to do. We took pre-existing sounds, “plagiarized” them, and reworked them into a completely new dialogue which shed new meaning on them.

Another piece of art work that influenced me during this project was Pixar’s short “Day & Night.” It’s the story of two characters who can only speak through either sounds found during the day or during the night, and show off what cool things they have in a day vs. night showdown. In the end, they discover that they create the most beautiful sights and sounds together. Our battle has a similar back-and-forth element and ended much in the same way.

It was really interesting to create a project in the limited (and at the same time, limitless) venue of the internet and work with pre-existing and pre-uploaded sounds. Hopefully, our live performance was able to reflect the preparation we put into gathering and rehearsing the sounds.